Exercise Blue Ham - a placeholder performance

The coronavirus pandemic meant that the club had a very reduced effort on this exercise. The 60m band is restricted to Full licensees only, so Richard G7LEE operated from home. Without the team effort it was a much reduced operation - I only made two contacts on the Sunday. However, I did achieve a first - an Olivia mode contact on the Saturday. However, I hadn’t changed the operator details in FLdigi, so the contact with MRE81 is shown as

Contacts for G7LEE = 1 MRE81(5278.5)

oddly enough not on the standard Olivia frequency. I used a linked dipole for 7MHz and added end pieces to tune this for 5MHz as an inverted Vee lifted into a tree. Conditions seemed very flat on the Saturday, even the Olivia digimode contact with MRE81 was tough (MRE81 is near Glasgow) but improved somewhat on Sunday. I made two contacts as MX0IOA

Contacts for MX0IOA = 2 MRE55(5.317),MRE50(5.3715)

which is a far cry from our 72 contacts in March

This was mainly to fly the flag to keep the club on the map. Activity in the exercise was down somewhat, but M0PLT/P achieved 66 contacts this time so it wasn’t so much down. The exercise is much easier as a team effort!